


Life After Survival

by bessemerprocess



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Victor, Character Death, Gen, Harm to Children, Implied Child Abuse, Rebellion, Remixed, Rue is Victor, Sacrifice, Sign Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-02
Updated: 2012-04-02
Packaged: 2017-11-02 22:27:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/374035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bessemerprocess/pseuds/bessemerprocess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rue wins the 74th Hunger Games, but it doesn't feel like winning at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life After Survival

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to cleo for the beta!

“There has been a change of rules. Only one tribute may win the Hunger Games,” the announcer repeats as they run from the muttations. The muttations growl and pant even as they crash out of the forest and on to the neatly mown grass at the center of the arena. Rue knows she’s about to die. She’s known from the minute they called her name, but she is even more certain now. Thresh is bigger and stronger than she is, and he is going to go home and be District 11’s first victor in twenty years.

Thresh picks her up and bodily places her atop the Cornucopia, anyway. She reaches a hand down to help him up, too, but he shakes his head.

“Tell my parents...” he says, but falters to a stop. Instead, he kisses his fingers and salutes her.

The first muttation pounces, grabs him by the throat and Rue screams over and over again, until the sunlight comes back, until they announce her the Victor, until the shuttle comes and they take her away.

***

Chaff is there when she wakes up, and her prep team: Iulia, Dominicus, and Greer. They explain that she’s won, that she is the victor of the seventy-fourth Hunger Games, that she gets to go home. Rue says nothing. There is nothing to say.

Home is home. More peacekeepers, more bowed heads. There was an incident during the Games, the mayor tells her quietly. Her family is dead. She cries, but she does not speak.

Maizie, who everyone knew was going to marry her brother one day, but now can’t, pulls her into a hug, and whispers in her ear that her father started a riot when the two winner rule was revoked, that they had almost broken through the peacekeepers, almost won. There were reinforcements, though, and they had killed indiscriminately. Rue has cried until there is nothing left inside her, but Maizie’s words spark something that feels like fire.

She’s silent throughout the entire Victory Tour, no matter how many doctors the Capital sends, no matter how many times Chaff and Seeder tempt her with sweet treats and kind words. Rue cannot imagine a world in which there are words anymore. There is just screaming and pain and death.

They bring her back to the Capital after the Tour anyway.

***

She likes the train, watching the countryside rush past the windows, almost as if she were flying. It's the only good part of the whole tour. On the train, no tries to force her to talk, not any more. Chaff grunts and Seeder swears up and down that a victor is entitled to whatever quirks they need to deal with this world and the prep team just keeps up a lighthearted banter of all the boys who’ll swoon over her and how the new caramel apple spun sugar puffs are the greatest thing to come out on the market this year.

Rue is not the only silent one on the train. There are four avox, three adults and a girl about Katniss’ age. They keep the train clean and make sure that there is always a feast laid out in the dining car. The avox girl teaches her to spell with her fingers. There wasn’t always a lot of time for schooling in District 11, but Rue manages. She gets better at it when the signs stand for words where she doesn’t have to think about the letters before she conforms her fingers to their shapes. Still, she doesn’t even let Chaff or Seeder know that she can talk this way. Sometimes secrets help keep you alive.

***

The Capital loves her, voicelessness and all. She’s the youngest victor ever, her twelfth birthday only coming three days before the Reaping. People want to touch her, to hug her, to shake her hand. Chaff turns into a permanent bodyguard, roping Haymitch in when he can’t be there. Haymitch is stand-offish at first, and every time they look at one another Katniss’ ghost stands between them. But the first time she reaches out to grab his hand when the booming noises and flashing lights of the Capital scare her, he is right there for her. There are actual bodyguards as well, but she doesn’t trust them like she trusts Chaff, and is coming to trust Haymitch.

She meets President Snow, and he pats her on the head, like he’s her elderly grandfather, and not the man who ordered her to her death. He seems a little put out that she won’t speak to him either, but he covers it with kindly patter, and sends her on her way with a handful of sweets.

She throws them in the nearest waste bin once they are out of the President’s sight.

***

Rue tumbles out of bed, just pulling on a dressing robe before heading to breakfast. Greer disapproves of showing up to meals without being perfectly dressed, but Rue figures the only reason Chaff bothers with clothing at all is because of Rue, and he certainly doesn’t care if she comes to breakfast barefoot.

They are supposed to be touring the Capital Zoo this morning, which will either be wonderful or terrifying, Rue isn’t sure which. She still has nightmares filled with muttations. Either way, she expects to find Chaff awake and mostly sober this morning. What she doesn’t expect is what she finds: Chaff, Seeder, and Haymitch gathered around the table trying to keep their voices down while yelling all the same.

They are so concerned with the letter that Chaff has fisted in his hands that not one of the three victors notice her approach the table.

“Intolerable!,” Seeder is saying.

“Barbaric even for the Capital,” Chaff growls.

“We need to stop this. We need a plan,” Haymitch says.

She pulls out a chair to join them, and they fall silent, finally noticing her. She tilts her head to the side, clearly asking what is going on.

“Nothing, little bird,” Seeder says, “Nothing at all.”

“Just a mix-up,” Chaff says, as Haymitch takes the letter and slips it inside his jacket pocket.

***

The zoo ends up being amazing, and not scary at all. There are no muttations there, only animals. Horses like they have at home, and cats and monkeys, too. They let her pet a mountain lion cub, and she smiles as it butts its head against her. The cameras like it when she’s happy, and for a moment with this furry creature, she genuinely is.

Once they are home, she yawns for all to see, and then heads back to her bedroom with no intention of sleep at all. There is a lock on her door. She’s never used it before, though Greer had insisted when Rue refused to stay in the apartment the Capital provided for her. It had been white and chrome and clean, and most of all, empty. She’d tried the first night, and before the sun fell all the way below the horizon, she had padded down the hallway to Chaff’s apartment and knocked until he’d let her in. He’d smelt of homebrew, but that was better than the sterile scent of cleaners in her own apartment.

She still doesn’t understand why Greer insisted on the lock, but tonight she decides to use it, before pulling the neatly folded letter out of her own pocket. She reads it carefully, but it only requests her presence at the birthday festivities of Caelius Atwater. She knows who he is, she’s seen him on the vids before, teaching children the alphabet and singing songs about taking turns.

Rue has not idea why he would want to meet her, but she’s gone to other birthday parties, here in the Capital, mostly for children her own age, who want to meet the victor and whose parents have enough money and enough power to make that happen. She never really enjoys these events, though once there had been a field of colored bubbles for the children to run through, and as each popped, they’d left a shimmering stain on her skin, turning her into a rainbow. When she’d returned home, her prep team had tried to wrangle her into a cleaning station immediately, but she’d refused, keeping the colors until they faded away of their own accord later that night.

She waits until she can hear Haymitch and Chaff snoring in counterpoint, before sneaking out of her room to return the letter. Seeder’s curled up in an armchair, not snoring at all, but still asleep, while Haymitch and Chaff are sprawl across the couches, the coffee table littered with glasses. Haymitch’s jacket is thrown across the back of the couch, and she eases the letter into the pocket with no trouble at all.

“Little bird,” Haymitch says softly, and Rue realizes she’s been caught red handed. She turns and ducks her chin, wondering what alerted him to her presence.

“Come’re,” he says, pulling himself upright, and patting the cushion beside him. She sits, curious.

“You read the letter?” he asks and she nods. “The avox tell me you can understand finger speech,” he says with his hands. Rue is shocked, both that Haymitch knows how to talk with his hands and that the avox would share her secret with him. She supposes she never asked them not to tell, she’d just assumed, and so she really has no right to be mad.

“It is just a birthday party,” she signs back.

“It isn’t,” Haymitch’s fingers say. “Atwater wants you for his own purposes. He paid enough to feed your District for ten years to Snow for the opportunity. I’m taking care of it. But for a while, you are going to have be extra careful. Stay with me, or Chaff, or Seeder. If for some reason you can’t, get to Finnick or Cinna. You remember them, right?”

Rue nods. Finnick comes around once a month or so, especially when there is something fun to do. He reminds her a bit of her brothers, and he’s always had a smile for her when the cameras weren’t looking. Cinna is a designer, the one who set Katniss on fire. He’s gentle and softspoken, and she’s only met him twice, but she trusts Haymitch and so she’ll trust him. “Okay,” she signs.

“Off to bed with you, now,” Haymitch says, this time with his voice. “I’m going to make sure these two lugs don’t sleep all night on the furniture.”

She doesn’t ever find out what Haymitch does, but no more letters show up. At least none that require pre-breakfast panic.

***

She turns thirteen in the lead up to the Reaping, and the Quarter Quell is on everyone's mind. Her face is splashed across the vids, and people she has never met send her presents.

The only one that really matters is from Haymitch. He presses something into her palm, and says, haltingly, “It was hers. It’s yours now.”

She recognizes the pin. It’s Katniss’ and when Rue hands it back to Haymitch so he can pin it on the underside of the little jacket that matches her dress his eyes fog suspiciously. He pats her shoulder, just over where the pin is concealed, and she lays her hand atop his. They stand there like that for a moment, and then Haymitch nods and steps away.

Chaff is on duty tonight, and Rue knows that Haymitch will be too drunk to walk in a straight line before they even cut her birthday cake. She doesn’t blame him at all.

Her birthday party is the social event of the season, or so Greer kept telling her as her prep team got her ready. She knows almost no one here, just the other victors. Haymitch, Chaff, and Seeder, but also Finnick and Johanna and even the boy who won the year before her. 

The music in the club is loud, and Rue startles a little at every drum beat. People dance, tangling themselves into a rainbow of wildly colored hair and minimal clothes. She knows they are enjoying themselves, but the drums don’t set her body free, instead they tug on her mind, pulling her ever back into the arena.

She was too far away to feel the explosion, but she heard it, standing next to the rain-soaked pile of wood that would have been a fire to lure the Careers away from their supplies. Would have, except for the sky opening up and pouring rain down upon her and it and nothing else.

Rue expects Katniss to come back once she realizes that there won’t be a fire, so she waits, high up in the trees, trying to come up with a new plan.

The noise is loud, rumbling across the arena, and the canons quickly follow: one, two, three, she counts, four, five, and then a minute later, six.

Now she knows that Katniss had lured the Careers to the pile of supplies, and now she knows Katniss set off the explosives, killing them all. Rue sees the video later, Caeser Flickerman shows it to her in front of a crowd of thousands, and all she wants to do is throw up. Katniss had saved her life. Maybe not on purpose, but she’d taken all the remaining Careers with her, and the girl from District 5 as well.

Chaff is at her elbow, now, pulling her away from the dance floor, and for a second she fights him, forgetting where she is. He waits her out, saying nothing until she is calmed. He is almost as quiet as she is these days, and he’s not yet had more than a drink or two.

Haymitch joins them as Seneca Crane takes the stage, thanking everyone for coming, and congratulating Rue once again for winning her games.

“As a special treat for our victor,” he says into the vidcams, “we will be announcing the terms of the Quarter Quell!”

The audience goes wild, cheering and shouting, but Rue’s stomach turns and she backs up until she is pressed between Chaff and Haymitch. Seeder finds her way to them, and takes Rue’s hand. Rue plans on never letting go.

The vid screen comes to life behind Crane’s head and President Snow appears, yellowed envelope in hand.

“Citizens of Panem, the 75th Annual Hunger Games, the third quarter quell, is almost upon us.”

Rue doesn’t look back up until Snow opens the envelope, trying not to hear the words he is saying.

“As in the rebellion disproportionately killed the youngest among us, the Quarter Quell will only reap those who are still in their first year of eligibility.”

A murmur runs through the crowd like a wave, and people turn around to stare at her. The President fades off the screen, and Crane starts a round of applause that turns wild, the crowd clapping and stomping their feet in approve of the fact that twenty-three twelve year olds are about to die.

“What an honor for our victor!” Crane declares.

Rue turns to Haymitch, and under the concealment of the dim lights, signs to him, “We have to stop them.”

Haymitch smiles, actually smiles, and signs back, “Welcome to the rebellion.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [That Certain Look a Victor Has (The Burning Bird Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/389372) by [Sour_Idealist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist/pseuds/Sour_Idealist)




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